For longer than she could fathom, she had been absent from the world, shut away in a void, a throbbing vortex of dreams which, for her, had been a whole universe, another reality.
Now she awoke. As the dreams slipped away, she was aware of herself screaming relentlessly, begging to stay among all the lovely images. But once she was fully awake, she found the world utterly silent, and her mouth filled with a filmy bad taste as if she had not spoken in months.
She was not sure where she was, except that she seemed to be in a small, dim room with uncomfortable carpet, lying partway under a table. She observed the underside of the table, the worn legs of the chairs surrounding it, the scratches and scuff marks on the beige walls. Her mind took its time fully apprehending these objects, to translate her senses and communicate to her that this was reality.
After a while she began to be aware of her own body. It was oddly specific to her. In her dreams, she had been, well, not formless, but not confined to any one shape either. She had gone through whole series of adventures among many groups of people, always aware of who she was and always the same to everyone else, but she had not always looked the same. Sometimes she had been a cat, sometimes a bird, sometimes a little boy with scruffy hair, sometimes a sort of elf, quite often a middle-aged woman with a pale face and sad brown eyes. But she could not quite remember ever being the self she was now. Her hands were slightly pudgier than she would have thought, and her skin more golden in hue. Her shoes, which she could only just see, had been doodled all over with bright markers, and there were beads and charms threaded into the laces. She seemed to be wearing gray cargo pants and a plain black jacket. She had really never noticed her clothing in any of her dreams.
If she closed one eye she could just see the side of her nose. In her dreams, hadn’t she been able to see anything and everything at all times, switching perspectives constantly?
With this thought, there swelled up inside her a horrible weight of desperation. And with this desperation came a strange image.
It was the face of one she had seen in her dreams—the one around whom everything revolved. It was some kind of horrible “Him”—not horrible because he was a man, or because there was anything really bad about him at all, but because she did not know how to feel about him. She felt too much and too little when it came to him. In her memory there floated the memory of his eyes, dark and deep, slightly out of focus as she remembered them. She remembered that look of absolute calm—calmness without naivete, or any flippancy to it, or any despair. And in her mind there was gold hanging all about him, like sunlight but even more substantial than that.
And there came to her memory, too, the scent of incense and of blood. But before she had any time to think about that, the silence that surrounded her was disrupted. Feet were running down the hallway outside, and a soft worried voice was saying, “She’s just this way—”
The door swung open, and though her vision was mostly blocked by the table, she could just see a pair of high-top shoes, decorated brightly like her own. Within a second the shoes had darted around the table and there was a breathless, wide-eyed girl with cascading yellow-brown curls lifting her upright and putting her arm around her.
“Courtney—oh, you’re awake! Courtney, are you okay? You just fainted and hit your head so I went to get the librarian—”—there was a nervous-looking woman in a green sweater in the doorway— “—and it took forever but—you’re awake? You feel okay?”
Courtney looked at the girl and breathed in the vanilla scent that came from her hair. Memories of the real world were coming back now: poppyseed muffins eaten on the patio outside the cafe, even though it had rained earlier that day and the seats were damp. Long hours in a pink bedroom with dim yellow lighting, slaving over math problems with groans and spurts of hilarity. A plane ride in adjacent seats, watching the same movie at the same time on their separate screens. Strolling the aisles of bookstores, eating their first meal in a college cafeteria, trying not to snap as they argued over dorm room decorations at Target. This was her friend, her best friend, named Tasha, whom she had met at swim lessons when she was nine, whom she was now attending college with, whose face she knew better than she knew her own.
All of this came back in a flash. Courtney wanted to scream again—surely she could not bear these memories, their narrowness and specificity, eternally her past, her, Courtney’s past. Surely she could not bear this life so set in stone, destined to unfold along the same worn mortal path as everyone else, always trapped in space and steady time—in her dreams, hadn’t she been able to go anywhere, be anyone, the only constant that dark watchful gaze?
“How long were you gone?” She tried to smile at Tasha.
“Oh, only—only ten minutes. Are you sure you’re alright?”
So why had it felt like years?
Courtney let Tasha help her to her feet. She smiled apologetically at the librarian, who seemed like she wouldn’t have been much help even if Courtney had still been unconscious. “Hi, thanks for—coming to help. I think I’m alright. I really don’t know what happened.”
“You had the strangest look on your face,” Tasha fussed, brushing dust off of Courtney’s jacket.
“I’m glad you’re alright,” said the librarian very quietly. “Let me know if you ladies need anything more.” She disappeared into the dark hall.
“Well, so much for studying!” Tasha laughed, but there was a tremor to her tone—it was as if Courtney’s disorientedness had leaked out of her and filled the room like a cloud, inflaming Tasha’s characteristic nervousness. “I think we should go back to the room and let you rest. Now drink some water.” Before Courtney could protest, Tasha handed her her blue waterbottle and began packing their backpacks, which were both large and frayed and covered with pins and keychains, with the papers that were strewn all across the table. Courtney drank, wincing at the metallic taste. She was being much quieter than she would have normally. But she hardly knew how to be, after all that had gone on in her head.
As they walked through the library’s deathly silent hallways—Tasha holding Courtney’s backpack in her own arms, as she’d insisted upon—the memory of gold and those solemn dark eyes still hung at the edges of Courtney’s mind, foreign yet deeply familiar. She knew that those images—as well as the sharp stab of yearning for that land of freedom—would be always dogging her footsteps from now on.
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I hope you enjoyed! I’ll see you again in two weeks :)
Wow, very cool story!
Sometimes when I wake up from a nap, I am very disoriented. Once, my mom was talking to me, and I just stared at her for a few seconds, wondering who she was. It was weird.